Short Abstract

Celebrating 40 years of Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs, this roundtable explores the cyborg’s legacy in reimagining feminist identity, politics, and technoscience, with reflections from leading scholars and a special online greeting from Haraway herself.

Description

With this roundtable, we celebrate the 40th anniversary of "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s", written by Donna Haraway and first published in the Socialist Review in 1985. Haraway’s cyborg remains a powerful feminist figuration that critically engages with the politics of technoscience. It calls for a responsibility toward technology while disrupting rigid binaries and traditional forms of knowledge through resistance, transformation, and speculative fabulation.

In the Manifesto, the cyborg is introduced as a myth faithful to feminism and materialism, enabling “resistance and recoupling”. This figure imagines new affiliations beyond systems of classification and separation, challenging the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist foundations of Western culture.

Haraway’s conceptualisation of the cyborg has inspired generations of scholars to rethink relations between humans, technologies, and increasingly, nonhuman animals and their shared environment. Its influence extends beyond academia into literature, art, and film, where it has been continually expanded, reinterpreted, and sometimes stripped of its revolutionary edge. Mapping the full scope of conversations sparked by A Manifesto for Cyborgs is destined to fall short yet, reflecting on its legacy and ongoing relevance remains crucial.

This roundtable gathers scholars engaging with Haraway’s work to consider the cyborg’s role over the past forty years in reimagining feminist identity, politics, and embodiment across disciplines. What does the cyborg mean for technoscience today? What lessons can still be learned – or perhaps relearned – from it? And how might it be taught, read, or reinterpreted in years to come?

Donna Haraway informally confirmed her presence online with an introductory greeting.

Joining us for this cyborg conversation are:

1) Cecilia Åsberg - Linköping University (Sweden)

2) Angela Balzano – Università degli Studi di Torino (Italy)

3) Anna Maj – AGH University of Krakow (Poland)